Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Question Suggestions

Voting is now open on this month's bonus Republican: the choices are Mitch Daniels, Rudy Giuliani, and Jon Huntsman.

We've been doing it for what feels like forever but I think this is probably our last vote on a bonus Republican. We've tested pretty much everyone and at this point I think we're going to just add Tim Pawlenty permanently to the poll starting next month and after that we'll include whoever the top 5-6 people are at a given time in GOP primary polling.

Virginia won our vote on where to go for a state poll this week:

-Obviously we'll look at Tim Kaine on the Democratic side and George Allen and Jamie Radtke on the Republican side. Anyone else you think we should include on the poll in terms of potential Senate candidates?

29 comments:

How about an immigration question? A few localities in swing areas of VA have been hit hard by waves of anti-immigrant fervor, plus accompanying immigration reform movements. Would be curious to see how that issue plays out in the crosstabs of the Senate race.

I'm in Virginia and suggest for Senate include Congressman Bobby Scott because he's publicly mulling a run.

If you were to poll VA-Gov 2013, Terry McAuliffe and state Senator Chap Petersen favorables, and maybe 2013 VA-Gov ballot tests if you're contemplating that. If you're not doing VA-Gov 2013 at all, I'd nix Cuccinelli because that's his next choice of election, he won't run for Senate.

I see Daniels as the only one of those three with a chance in heck of winning the nomination.

Giuliani already proved himself to be a terrible campaigner and the "9/11 verb 9/11 noun 9/11" thing will work even less well in 2012 than it did in 2008. Plus he has too many socially liberally positions for the GOP base.

Huntsman worked in the Obama admin: 'nough said. That people are pretending like he has any chance is beyond silly to me. GOP primary voters today are not going to vote for someone who worked with Obama and praised him.

Daniels seems like the logical choice to me, since he is dropping hints more and more often and since he has decided to go after planned parenthood in IN, tacking to the extreme right.

And just a side note: I think it would do your website well to not allow anonymous postings. I think that posters should be registered either through google or open ID. Too many fly-byers with obvious political agendas, it is an annoyance and muddies up the clarity here.

And since it is Virginia, Mark Warner would be a good candidate to poll about future possibilities. Also current Governor McDonnell.

and quite obiously, the question whether the killing of Osama bin Laden has swayed voters from R to D or I to D in these last days.

Virginia has the earliest redistricting due to off-off-year elections - definitely consider polling awareness of the issue and approval/disapproval of the plans. Probably no one has been following it, but as a Richmond insider myself, I'd love to see how little the outside world cares.

Governor McDonnell has claimed that next year's legislative session will focus on energy, and there is a lot of buzz about it, so see how Virginians feel about:

All of these are pretty big issues that are happening right now in Virginia. It would be particularly interesting to see what spread, if any, there is between offshore wind vs. oil, and mining uranium (generally unpopular) vs. using it in nuclear plants (generally okay)

"The Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the Federal Government from recognizing valid same-sex marriages in states which legally perform them. The Senate is considering a bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. Would you support a repeal bill, or would you be against repeal?"

It would be logical to do another national poll on birtherism, now that Obama's original birth certificate has been released.

I hope you attempt a Presidential approval poll that includes the options of Strongly Approve, Somewhat Approve, Somewhat Disapprove, and Strongly Disapprove--Rasmussen's biggest methodological difference with other robocall pollsters like PPP.

Support for McDonnell to run for prez "in the future." Cuccinelli vs. Bolling in 2013 Governor Primary as well both aginst McAuliffe. McDonnell, Cuccinelli, Bolling approval ratings. Daniels for bonus. Get ready to make him a regular because his name recognition and support is shooting up as he moves closer to a run. Once the non-serious/non-runners ones get filtered out (Gingrich, Santorum, Bachmann, Palin, Trump) it will come down to Romney vs. Pawlenty vs. Daniels with Cain following stubbornly behind.

For the GOP primaryin VA, it might be interesting to poll both Allen vs. Radtke and Allen vs. Generic "more conservative candidate". For the general, I wonder if there's some way to test whether voters care about Allen's macaca controversy. There's been a lot of speculation as to whether this will significantly hurt Allen or whether voters have mostly gotten over it, and I think a poll on that would be useful.

"Rasmussen's biggest methodological difference with other robocall pollsters like PPP."

Not at all. Rasmussen employs an ultra-secret "Likely Voter" screen, and PPP does not. Pretty big difference right there, since Ras can literally remove all of the respondents who disagree with his narrative by simply designating them as "unlikely to vote".

Aside from that, Ras uses partisan weighting, which PPP does not.

Those two factors make an immense difference. A wider spectrum of approval and disapproval choices is a virtual non-factor.